With the exception of making yards and yards of seed tape (fall carrots), much of last weekend was spent in my kitchen. I’m sure I have a solid week’s worth of food posts! Hopefully, I can squeeze in the time needed to sit down and write seeing as how Sunday night I ended up pulling my remaining Easter planting of root vegetables. I have lots of canning and juicing on the horizon! 🙂

Sun-ripened apricots are one of my favorite fruits! While at the local market paroozing the fresh picked produce (come on now, I can’t grow everything), I noticed a bounty of apricots. Realizing I had never made apricot jam, I decided the time had come to remedy that!

After flipping through my canning books and online food sites, I decided to make Hitchhiking to Heaven’s amaretto apricot jam. It turned out awesome and it is now my new favorite add-in to my daily snack of Greek yogurt. By the way, if you have never added homemade jam to Greek yogurt you need to get on that. Like now!

1/4 cup amaretto (I used an “airplane” sized bottle of Disaronno, it was perfect!)

Blanch apricots to remove skins. Remove pits and mash. Add sugar and lemon juice. Over med-low heat, cook mixture ’til sugar is dissolved; continue cooking for 10-12 minutes. Apricot jam tends to foam up quite a bit, so don’t move too far from your stove! You can test the doneness of your jam by conducting a gelling test. Place several spoons in the freezer and once you have finished cooking your jam, take one of the frozen spoons from the icebox and scoop out just a bit of jam (not a full scoop). Place it back in the freezer for about 3 minutes, then hold it vertically. If your jam slowly creeps down your spoon like the 80’s horror flick the Blob, it’s done! Once the jam is done, remove it from the heat and carefully stir in your liqueur. Ladle into hot sterilized jars, leaving 1/4″ headspace, and process in a boiling water bath according to your recommended altitude time. For me it is 5 minutes. It may take about two weeks for your jam to reach a hard set.

I’m so glad it worked for you! Yours looks wonderful and the color is amazing. Daedre is right that you don’t have to blanch the apricots, but sometimes I prefer to do it. Leaving the skins in the mixture does change the texture and color a bit, and sometimes I like the super glossy brightness created by the blanched fruit. But it’s all good. Really good!